Opening of the Reggae Maranhão Museum, the first of its kind outside of Jamaica. Photo: Ingrid Barros, used with permission.
There are a few versions of how reggae music first arrived in São Luís, capital of Maranhão state, in the northeastern region of Brazil. One says that amateur radios captured short-wavelength signals from Caribbean stations. Another one claims sailors and migrants introduced reggae records into the city’s port zone, while some say the musical rhythm was already circling in dance rooms there.
How the symbiosis of the Jamaican culture and São Luís’ local identity came to be may be hard to determine, say local experts. Yet, it’s still palpable to anyone who visits the city today.
With an estimated population of 1.03 million, São Luís carries the title of “Brazilian Jamaica” and has been considered the national reggae capital since 2023. The influence on its local identity gained force in the 1980s and grew roots over time, even among the fans of a local football club, Sampaio Corrêa.
Ademar Danilo, the director of the Maranhão’s Reggae Museum and a journalist, says that reggae culture influences the local people's way of being — how they talk (slangs), dress (with braids and the three colors of reggae on their clothes), and dance (they even have their own style of dancing reggae, ‘‘agarradinho,’’ holding on to each other tightly).
Não temos a gênese da coisa, como chegou, mas nós sabemos que chegou. E a partir daí, nós nos apropriamos disso. O maranhense se apropriou do reggae. O reggae, ele é jamaicano, claro, mas ele também é maranhense. Nós importamos um ritmo da Jamaica e a partir daí temos uma nova significação cultural. Nós transformamos o reggae em um elemento cultural. Quando eu falo elemento cultural, ou seja, algo que seja possível de transformar a cultura local.
We do not have the genesis of how it arrived here, but we do know that it did. And from that on, we owned it. The Maranhense people owned reggae for themselves. Reggae is Jamaican, of course, but it’s also Maranhense now. We imported the rhythm from Jamaica, giving it a new cultural significance here. We turned it into a cultural element, meaning something that has the power to transform the local culture.
Writer and researcher Bruno Azevedo notices a mythical construction of reggae culture in São Luís.
No que vejo o reggae chegou na miúda e por várias vias, mas a pergunta interessante é como o reggae fez sentido para o brincante local e isso é explorado super bem pelo Carlão, Carlos Benedito Rodrigues da Silva, um antropólogo que escreveu sobre o tema ainda nos anos 1990: o reggae tem uma série de elementos de identificação pra população preta-pobre local.
Há também uma série de semelhanças sociais entre os jamaicanos e os maranhenses, mas acho uma extrapolação grande demais que isso tudo seja transmitido 1×1 na música. A despeito da minha opinião, a forma como os maranhenses criaram sistemas e equipamentos sociais muito parecidos com os jamaicanos, é impressionante.
From what I see, reggae came in smoothly and through several paths. But the interesting question is how it made sense to the local player, which is well explored by Carlão, Carlos Benedito Rodrigues da Silva, an anthropologist who wrote about it in the 1990s: reggae carries several identity elements for the local Black and poor people.
There are also a lot of social similarities between Jamaican and Maranhense people, but I think is an overstretch to think that it would all be transmitted one-on-one through music. Despite my opinion, the way people in Maranhão created systems and social equipment resembling those from Jamaica is quite impressive.
Opening of the Reggae Maranhão Museum, the first of its kind outside of Jamaica. Photo: Ingrid Barros, used with permission.
Gilberto Gil, the legendary musician and former culture minister, was the one responsible for spreading reggae music in Brazil. He even recorded with The Wailers, Bob Marley’s band, and sang with another Jamaican cultural legend, Jimmy Cliff. Still, despite being popular around the country, it is in São Luís where the Caribbean rhythm became something beyond music.
Museum, parties and streets
In 2018, Maranhão opened the doors to the first Reggae Museum in Brazil. After years of marginalization and repression by law enforcement, the state itself acknowledged the importance of reggae for the local culture and its identity. Among the relics of the movement’s local history on display is the first guitar of Tribo de Jah, a Brazilian reggae band created in the 1980s in São Luís, and DJ Serralheiro’s radiola, a sound system built as a wall of speakers that is a trademark of local reggae parties, which belonged to Serralheiro, one of the pioneers of reggae there.
Reggae was quickly associated to the popular culture in Maranhão since its early days there, explains Ademar Danilo, mixed to traditions such as the ‘‘Bumba Meu Boi,’’ a sort of interactive play in the streets that originated in the 18th century, the ‘‘Tambor de Crioula,’’ an Afro-Brazilian dance with drums and percussion, and capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial art. For a while, before there were public policies to fund these cultural manifestations, it was the money raised in reggae parties that helped support them.
‘‘We imported and owned the music, their rhythm and based on it, we developed a culture of our own,’’ says Danilo. ‘‘When reggae music first arrived here, it wasn’t a foreign invader. It came more or less like a brother that was born elsewhere.’’
Opening of the Reggae Maranhão Museum, the first of its kind outside of Jamaica. Photo: Ingrid Barros, used with permission.
Today, the reggae music that Maranhense people listen to is mostly from artists who were active between 1973 and 1981 in Jamaica and their own local performers. The radiolas are the foundation for local reggae events and part of DJ battles. ‘‘The largest paredões (big walls) in Brazil you'll find are in Maranhão’s reggae. Even larger than the ones in Pará’s techno-brega, says Danilo.
The Maranhense photographer Ingrid Barros, who works with subjects such as resistance and memory, says about the reggae's presence in her homeland:
Os bailes de reggae são os espaços onde é possível extravasar todo o estresse do dia a dia, é onde há a confraternização com os outros iguais, com os pares. Tem um lance de pertencimento, de identificação. O ritmo que se populariza por meio da imagem de um homem negro, que se torna rei do reggae. É meio que um lugar/momento onde se pode apenas ser, sem se preocupar muito com todas as castrações que a sociedade faz com nossos corpos pretos.
Reggae balls here are spaces where you can release all the stress you endure in your daily lives and get-together with your peers. There is a sense of belonging, of identification. The rhythm that turned popular through the image of a Black man, who became king of reggae. It’s sort of a place/moment where you can simply be, without worrying too much about all the castrations society imposes to our Black bodies.
Under Bob Marley’s influence
Opening of the Reggae Maranhão Museum, the first of its kind outside of Jamaica. Photo: Ingrid Barros, used with permission.
One of the tourist spots in São Luis is a corner located in Brazil's biggest urban quilombo, a term designating hinterland settlements formed by people of African descent, honoring Bob Marley. The place is featured in a 2012 documentary traveling to places linked to the Jamaican artist, even though Marley never visited São Luís.
His only time in Brazil was a short trip in 1980 for an event launching the record label Ariola there. With the country still under a military dictatorship, Marley and his crew were flagged as suspicious and denied work visas, but had those for tourism granted. Without any concerts booked, the visit led to a historical football match, with Marley listing Brazil’s legendary musician Chico Buarque on his team.
Marley loved football — including Brazil’s national team and Pelé's club Santos — as much as he loved music. To the reporters waiting for him in Rio, he declared: “Reggae has the same roots, the same heat and the same rhythm as samba.”
Brazil has a federal law recognizing May 11, the date of his death, as National Reggae Day, but in Maranhão, its influence echoes strongly throughout the year. In 2024, photographer Ingrid Barros worked on an advertising campaign for a sneaker brand with a line dedicated to Marley. The motto was the relation between his homeland in Jamaica and São Luís, the Brazilian Jamaica, through its people, colors, reggae parties and, of course, music.
Barros says that among the importance of reggae in São Luís and its local elements, Marley is still the king. Walking around peripheral areas, she says, one often spots flags and murals with his face on them:
Acho que o reggae está na nossa vida [aqui] desde que a gente nasce. Não tem como não ter uma memória afetiva do reggae, está presente seja dentro de nossas casas, na casa de vizinhos, no barzinho da esquina do bairro. Isso fica como identidade. Algo em que você se reconhece. Já adulta, e trabalhando com fotografia e direção criativa, criei uma relação com essa beleza, com a potência, com o universo próprio e político que é o reggae.
Reggae is in our lives [here] since we are born. You can’t avoid having an affective memory of it, it’s present whether it’s in our homes, our neighbors’, or at the neighborhood bar around the corner. That lingers as identity. Something through which one recognizes oneself. As an adult, working with photography and creative direction, I built a relationship with the beauty, the power, the political universe of its own that is reggae.
Opening of the Reggae Maranhão Museum, the first of its kind outside of Jamaica. Photo: Ingrid Barros, used with permission.
